Tag: trauma momma

Posted in Loss, Trauma

Geo

Posted on by soshewritesweb

This may be hard for many of you to read and I know that because, as hard as it is for you to read, it is infinitely harder for me to write. 

I remember when I was 17, I was riding into town with my mom and grandma when my mom ran over a turtle, we heard the shell crunch, I cried out in sadness and my grandma said “it’s okay honey, that’s what the shell is for, it will be fine. It will just find a new shell” I turned to her to let her know I was too old to fall for her stories trying to make me feel better and realized she actually believed it. Like a 2-pound turtle could actually survive a 2-ton Chevy Silverado. I feel like the last month, and a half of my life has been that sentimentality on repeat with everyone I talk to. Let me explain…

My son passed away ten days before Christmas, suddenly and senselessly. My husband and I received the 2am phone call every parent fear to receive. “Your son is in the emergency room; he has a head trauma and there is nothing we can do except keep him comfortable until you get here” the hour and a half drive felt like it took days. All the scenarios playing in my mind.  The conversation with God, begging for a miracle, not him please God, not my son. The calls that had to be made in a car bound for the hardest moments of my life to each sibling that wasn’t with us. To his brother in another state working, his sisters who would be woke from their last night of peaceful sleep for years to come. Each call made with the same numb unsure voice, “Your brother is in the hospital, we dont know much but he isnt going to survive the rest of the night, come quickly.” The walk through the halls escorted by police, walking into a room seeing my beautiful boy being kept alive by tubes and machines will forever be etched into my brain. I sat on the bedside and the bargaining began.

“You can heal him, his story will bring so many to you when we share the miracle he received from you.”

“I will give up everything for his life, even if it means taking care of him for the rest of mine.”

“God, you are the ultimate healer! Show these doctors how its done!”

And the hardest plea, the hardest words I have had to utter to my father, “not yet, he isnt yours yet, please give him another chance to give his life to You.”

In those hours of begging and bargaining with God, we watched our boy fade. We listened to the doctors and had to choose between what we wanted and what he would want. We had to face the truth that not every story ends with a miracle we would prefer. There was no coming back from this injury, he was out of time, and the only chance at continued life was through his choice of organ donation and so we signed the paperwork honoring his gift. December 15, 2025, at 1338 my son was officially declared dead.

Immediately I began being told I would see him again, that he was in a better place, he was with God, and he was watching over me. Here is where I am going to lose many of you, I would be lying to myself and everyone I talk to if I agreed with those statements. Let me first say that I do not know where my son is, I am not God. I was not privy to conversations my son had with God, if any. I was not privy to the conversation had on that fatal night. I am only privy to the Word of God and His plan for salvation. I can tell you that I pray daily for God to choose to show mercy and grace to my son and daily I wrestle with the scriptures that cannot be denied.

I look around at the world, at the lines that have been blurred for our comfort and desires and ask myself how we got here. To a world where even “christians” don’t want sin acknowledged as sin. I sat in that hospital room listening to the sounds of the machines breathing for my son’s body, knowing and feeling that he was gone and his shell was all that remained and I wanted desperately to agree with everyone around me that he was in the arms of my father, but then I looked at each of his siblings whom he dearly loved surrounding him and I thought of the rich man begging God to allow him to warn his brothers that Hell existed and I knew that Geo would not want to risk them staying in a life ignoring the Words of God to make me feel better. I sat with my son in that room for two days watching friends and family holding onto him, crying, hoping, and saying goodbye and I could only hear my promise I made him so many times, “I won’t lie, not to you, for you, or about you” and this lie would be the easiest one I would ever tell if I chose to and the hardest one to deny.

From the day I lost my boy until this day I have wrestled with God, the scriptures, and my own selfish desires of wanting comfort over sharing truth. The bible tells us clearly that many will say “Lord Lord” and still be turned away (Matthew 7:21). Scripture is clear that we must profess Christ, be born again, and do the will of the father (Romans 10:9, John 3:3) and warns of the wide and narrow path (Matthew 7:13). God tells us clearly, we must live in obedience, die to ourselves, and no longer live in sin. Again, I am not God, I do not know the conversations shared with Him and G, but I know the life G was living. I know that he was raised in church, went to the camps and Wednesday night youth group. I know we prayed as a family, shared our convictions and belief in God, I know he studied the bible with friends and that he told me many times he wasn’t ready to stop “living”. G shared with me how he just wanted to have fun and enjoy life. I know he went to church and even took his girlfriends with him, so he knew the importance of God. I know that when we spoke about living with his girlfriend not being what God wanted, he said “yeah, but it’s not the worse sin” so he understood what sin was. Tragically, like many young people who cannot fathom life being taken too soon, my son thought he had time to choose God after he chose to live the life the world tells them is worth living. Only age and loss can tell you it really isn’t. As I read 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 my heart breaks that my sweet boy thought he was living the good life as he experienced nearly every one of those sins listed every day of his life out of our home, including the last night of his life. That scripture tells us those who live in those sins will not inherit the kingdom.

I will say one more time, I am not God. I do not know with certainty where my son is or where he will spend eternity. But, as I look at what is going on around the world, specifically our country, and see the blurred lines of what sin is and churches sliding the scale to allow comfort over truth, I have to be willing to get off the crazy-go-round and speak truth. It would be easy to talk myself into believing G is in heaven, that there is some loophole in the trauma he was put through as a baby and young child that gave him a free pass. If I did that, my testimony would be void. If I lied for myself but warned others that choices matter, that you aren’t born a Christian, that being a US citizen doesn’t automatically give you heavenly citizenship then I would be a hypocrite and would be failing my savior and my son. If G is lost, if he is going to be ushered into eternity without God, I don’t want to be one of the people who failed his siblings and friends and risk them following him into that place without a fight.

Yes, God is good, God is merciful, and God is Just. God gives free will and allows us to make the choice. Though God gives mercy to those He chooses to give mercy and compassion on whom He will give compassion we cannot deny he gave His son Jesus Christ and to deny Him is to deny God. This world is chaos; it points us to indulge and enjoy without worry that there will be a cost of doing such. We do not know when our time will be cut off, but we do know there is a court appearance when we pass, we know that God is the judge and Christ is the only plea that offers freedom and salvation. Just like that turtle who wouldn’t just be able to go find another shell to live in, we do not have a second chance of choosing God after we take our last breath on this earth, my son ran out of time but his friends and family still have some, and so I write………….

Posted in Adoption, Trauma, Mother, daughter, RAD

Strength is My Weakness

Posted on by soshewritesweb

Nearly every job interview I have ever had, the interviewer has asked me to tell them my greatest strength and greatest weakness. I am not sure I ever gave an honest answer. I mean, who does? We try our hardest to give a strength we think would impress the interviewer, then we give a weakness that is really a strength, and we try our hardest to seem humble. You know, something like, “I am really organized, so it is hard for me to leave a job undone or a mess. I often give too much to my career and sacrifice my personal time to get the job done.” I mean, come on, how can anyone really give a weakness and expect to get the job? But what if your strength IS actually a weakness? I have begun to see my strong will and “get-er-done” attitude as a crippling attribute that can leave me exhausted and completely empty. Why is that, you ask? Because the strong become the ones everyone turns to in hard times and chaos, but what happens when the strong break under the pressure? The scariest look to receive is from a family member who sees you breaking, and the fear in their eyes as they ask themselves, if you can’t handle it, how will they?

Growing up, I learned quickly to hide the hurt. I learned to pull myself up by my bootstraps (yes, it can be done), to wipe my eyes and deal. Three big brothers didn’t exactly lead to a girl in flowy dresses and a straight tiara. I was more of the torn jeans and a Bryan Adams t-shirt under my flannel, with a baseball cap on my head and an attitude in my walk kinda gal. The words by Miranda Lambert ring truer in my ears than most.

“Hide your crazy and start acting like a lady, cause I raised you better. Gotta keep it together even when you fall apart”

Miranda Lambert ‘Four the Record’

I learned early to stuff the emotions too big to handle deep down and not let the fear of it all show. The world could be falling down around you, but girl, you better have those lips on just right! I was always proud of being the strong one in the group; it was easy to hide the nerves and insecurities when everyone around you depended on you to get through it. It gets easier with time to hit hard times head-on and do it with a smile, shrug your shoulders, and just deal. I spent many years taking on the challenge of turning chaos into manageable hardship, only to find it isn’t really all that manageable. When deciding on adoption, I never doubted for a moment that I would handle the craziness that would come with the cuteness. I heard over and over from all our friends and family, “If anyone can do this, it’s you.” It became a repeated phrase each time we hit a new type of chaos, every time I reached out to say I wasn’t sure I could get through it.

She ran away again, stayed gone all night this time ” you’re strong enough to get through this”

She pulled a knife on her brother and is threating to kill us all “if anyone can get through this its you”

I’m doubting everything and everyone around me. “Girl, I know you got this”

At some point there has to be recognition that there is a wall that can be hit and not climbed by even the strongest. When that happens, what do you do? Well, you do what you’ve always done, you pull yourself up by the bootstrap, brush yourself off and then have a long conversation with yourself on how to continue on, but only after you have allowed yourself to break.

You see, only when one breaks can one be put back together. When you break, there is no choice but to be put back together (well, not a choice I want or can acknowledge). When you break, those around you have to step in; it forces them to, and forces you to allow it.  There is a key question in job interviews that I think goes right over the heads of those who have the inherent need to do it all and do it all well: “Do you work better in a group or alone?” Again, who says “alone”? Even when knowing you would do it faster and better if you just did it yourself, that’s not what the employer wants to hear, even when they know you’re being hired because there is a need for someone who can do it alone without fail. It’s a catch-22. Better together, easier alone, never admit the latter.

That is the reason strength can be a weakness. You don’t learn to lean on people in hard times, you learn to lead them through it. You aren’t use to asking if another sees a better path forward, you’re focused on controlling the path you’re on. Employers ask if you work well with others for a reason,  there are warnings for two person lifts for a reason, sports have teams not just one athlete for a reason. We need others to help so we don’t get hurt or burnt out or lost in the chaos and make it to the finish line. When you control, take it all on, and plow through, you remove lessons that both you and the ones you are trying to help need to be able to learn.  When you don’t allow help, how will they learn to do so? They can’t and those who knew how have become too frozen from your control or compliant and lazy to do so. Just take a look around you, we have become a society that sits back and watches people struggle while we shrug our shoulders and say “Meh, they can handle it.  It’s not my place to step in”.

I hit my wall four years ago. I finally broke under all the “strength” of holding it together. In my breaking, my husband, son, some family, and close friends were able to step up and surround me with the true strength I so desperately needed: love, comfort, rest. They helped me through letting go—letting go of the future I fought for and would never see, letting go of the expectations that hard work would surely pay off, letting go of dreams that were never mine to dream. Our oldest daughter turned 18 and turned to a life we had tried desperately to guard her from; our other two children had to live separately, so we had to buy a second home. All of this was smack-dab in the thick of COVID. I had too many paths of chaos, and none of them could be managed without my breaking and being put back together. I didn’t break overnight; I broke slowly and painfully as each hit came at me. I didn’t get put back together overnight; I had to sit through each piece of me being picked up off the floor and then had to wait for the glue to dry before the next piece could be found and placed. I still haven’t found all the pieces of who I once was; the cracks are still raw, the glue still not completely dry. Today, exactly 14 years to the day of finalizing the adoption of my beautiful blue-eyed girl, I am planning a trip to sit in court and fight for her beautiful little brown-eyed girl to be kept from her so she has a chance and a future her mother was robbed of. She chose the life I put all my strength into fighting off, and in my weakness, I blamed myself for not having enough strength to save her. But I now realize it takes more strength to let go and allow her to make her own path, find her own way out of the pit, or allow her to bury herself in that pit. We all have to choose, take the lessons taught, and do with them what we will.

I have a new future in sight, dreams that are mine to dream, and expectations of finding myself all over again with a little hard work and help from the love of my life…and so I write.